Trump news: First public impeachment hearings to begin in days, as president suffers election humiliation and huge 2020 poll deficits
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Your support makes all the difference.David Hale, a senior State Department official, is testifying to the House impeachment inquiry the morning after Donald Trump suffered a series of disastrous electoral setbacks, with the Democrats declaring victory in key races in Virginia and Kentucky.
Mr Trump also finds himself trailing behind Democratic 2020 candidates Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg by double-digit margins on Wednesday, according to the latest poll from ABC News/Washington Post.
Perhaps worst of all, the president’s ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, a key figure in the impeachment probe, has revised his own testimony, admitting a quid pro quo was behind the decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine and that the administration only planned to release the money in exchange for new president Volodymyr Zelensky announcing an anti-corruption probe into Mr Biden.
The day proceeded with Democrats announcing the first set of public impeachment hearings for next week.
Then, testimony from William Taylor was released in full, showing a worrisome situation for the president.
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Donald Trump has suffered a series of disastrous setbacks as the Democrats declared victory in key elections in Virginia and Kentucky, gaining control of the former’s House and Senate for the first time since 1993 and claiming a win in the latter’s tightly fought gubernatorial race for Andy Beshear over GOP incumbent Matt Bevin, backed by the president at his Lexington rally on Monday night.
"Tonight, voters in Kentucky sent a message, loud and clear, for everyone to hear," Beshear said. "It’s a message that says our elections don’t have to be about right versus left, they are still about right versus wrong."
Bevin has yet to officially concede at the time of writing.
In Virginia, Democratic governor Ralph Northam told a jubilant crowd in Richmond: "I'm here to officially declare today, 5 November 2019, that Virginia is officially blue."
A year before the presidential election, the results offered warning signs for both parties. Voters in suburban swathes of Kentucky and Virginia sided with Democrats, a trend that would complicate Trump's path to re-election if it holds. And the Democrats who made gains on Tuesday did so by largely avoiding positions such as "Medicare for All" that have animated the party's left flank in the Democratic presidential primary.
Democratic pickups in Virginia occurred in Washington, DC, and Richmond suburbs that had already trended in the party's direction in recent years. Other statewide GOP candidates in Kentucky won by comfortable margins. But the disappointment at the top of the ticket still offered another example in the Trump era of suburban voters' willingness to abandon established Republican loyalties - even with the president making a personal appeal on behalf of a GOP standard-bearer.
“He’s such a pain in the ass, but that’s what you want!” Trump said of the governor during his speech on Monday, Bevin a man deeply unpopular in the state after feuding with local teachers.
"You gotta vote because if you lose, it sends a really bad message," the president told his audience. "It just sends a bad... and they will build it up... If you lose, they'll say 'Trump suffered the greatest defeat in the history of the world'. You can't let that happen to me!"
The Republicans did retain the governor's seat in Missippissippi, where the state's lieutenant governor Tate Reeves took the top job from term-limited Phil Bryant after winning a closely contested battle with Democratic attorney general Jim Hood. But even that contest could finish with a single-digit margin in a state Trump won by 28 points three years ago.
The tighter result for Reeves reflected the same suburban trends seen in other states. Heavily Republican counties outside Jackson, Mississippi, and Memphis, Tennessee, still tilted to the GOP nominee, but by noticeably narrower margins than what Bryant had four years ago to win a second term.
Legislative seats were also on the ballot in New Jersey, with Democrats positioned to maintain their overwhelming majorities and quell any opportunity for Trump to suggest that the Republicans were encroaching on Democratic territory ahead of 2020.
On Twitter, the president was busy attempting to stage manage the outcome on what proved to be an awful night for his party:
Here's Zamira Rahim's report.
Trump also finds himself trailing behind Democratic 2020 presidential contenders Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg by double-digit margins in the latest poll from ABC News/Washington Post.
Here's our report on some exceedingly grim data for the president.
Perhaps worst of all, the president’s ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, a key figure in the impeachment inquiry, has revised his testimony, admitting a quid pro quo was behind the decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine and that the administration only planned to release the money in exchange for Volodymyr Zelensky announcing an anti-corruption probe into Biden.
Having initially claimed the president's interactions with Kiev carried no strings, Sondland says in new testimony released by investigators he was aware US assistance to Kiev was dependent on such an undertaking. He also says he suspected the parallel outreach undertaken by Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, may have been illegal.
Meanwhile, testimony from another diplomat, the former special envoy for Ukraine, Kurt Volker, had revealed that Sondland told investigators he thought the threat to withhold military aid, intended to help support Ukraine against Russia, was “unusual”.
Here's Andrew Buncombe with the latest.
Sondland also reveals in the new transcript that secretary of state Mike Pompeo "rolled his eyes" when when was told about Giuliani’s back channel outreach to top Ukraine officials.
Diplomacy and engagement with foreign nations is typically carried out by professional officials under the direction of the State Department, of course.
Responding to the release of the Volker and Sondland transcripts yesterday - relating to interviews held on the 3 and 17 October respectively - White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham attempted to put out the blazing dumpster fire with little success:
Both transcripts released today show there is even less evidence for this illegitimate impeachment sham than previously thought. No amount of salacious media-biased headlines, which are clearly designed to influence the narrative, change the fact that the President has done nothing wrong.
Ambassador Sondland squarely states that he ‘did not know, [and still does not know] when, why or by whom the aid was suspended.’ He also said he ‘presumed’ there was a link to the aid - but cannot identify any solid source for that assumption.
She later appeared on Lou Dobbs's Fox show to say they actually "vindicate" the president:
Kentucky senator Rand Paul has been threatening to unmask the CIA whistleblower whose complaint sparked the impeachment inquiry in recent days, challenging the media to print their name and ignore concerns for the informant's personal safety.
Like Grisham, he too went on Fox to make his case, repeating the threat on Brett Baier's show last night.
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer is among those to have denounced Paul, declaring on the floor of the upper chamber: I cannot stress just how wrong this is. We have federal whistleblower laws designed to protect the identity and safety of patriotic Americans who come forward to stand up for the Constitution.
Here's Schumer continuing his attack on Paul yesterday...
...which has been joined by Republican rebels like Susan Collins and Roy Blunt.
"Whistleblowers are entitled to protection under the law... to try to reveal the identity of this individual is contrary to the intent of the whistleblower law," Collins told The Huffington Post.
Trump, naturally, thinks it's an "excellent" idea.
The State Department's third-ranking official is expected to tell the House impeachment inquiry today that political considerations were behind the agency's refusal to deliver a robust defence of former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
The highest-ranking career diplomat in the foreign service, David Hale, plans to tell congressional investigators on Wednesday that Pompeo and other senior officials determined that defending Yovanovitch would hurt the effort to free up US military assistance to Ukraine.
Hale will also reportedly say that the State Department worried about the reaction from Giuliani, also one of the strongest advocates for her removal.
Yovanovitch, who was recalled from her posting in May, has already appeared before investigators in the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. She detailed efforts by Giuliani and other Trump allies to push her out of Ukraine, testifying that a senior Ukrainian official told her that "I really needed to watch my back."
Hale is expected to shed more light on why the State Department did not step up to defend its top envoy in Kiev. According to people familiar with the matter, he will say he tried to distance himself and the department from the matter by removing himself from email chains about Yovanovitch.
Hale, for example, never responded to an email sent by former top Pompeo adviser Michael McKinley urging Pompeo to speak out in defence of Yovanovitch after the White House released a partial transcript of the Trump-Zelenskiy phone call, the officials said.
One official said Hale had "tried to take himself out of the loop on Ukraine." But another said Hale would defend Pompeo's actions as "politically smart" for the State Department and its employees in the long run.
Hale, a fluent Arabic speaker who joined the foreign service in 1984, has served as ambassador to Lebanon, Pakistan and Jordan as well as in posts in Tunisia, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
House Republicans are reportedly plotting to temporarily place two Trump hardliners, congressmen Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows, on the House Intelligence Committee in a bid to shore up the president's defenders on the panel.
The resolution the House passed last Thursday establishing the rules for the public phase of the impeachment inquiry stated that members of the Intelligence Committee would be entitled to question witnesses while those on the Foreign Affairs and Oversight and Reform Committees would not, hence the decision, which promises to add to the theatre of the televised hearings.
“If Democrats are going to turn Intel into the impeachment committee, I am going to make adjustments to that committee accordingly, for a short period of time,” House minority leader Kevin McCarthy told Politco, not naming which current Republican members of the committee he would bump for loyalists Jordan and Meadows.
Here's Jordan discussing the prospect on Fox and Friends yesterday morning.
"That's a Kevin, Leader McCarthy's call. If Kevin and ranking member [Devin] Nunes want that to happen and that helps - I just want to help our team,” Jordan said. “I want to help the country see the truth here that President Trump didn't do anything wrong and what the Democrats are doing is partisan, it's unfair and frankly, it's ridiculous, particularly the way they've went about with these secret meetings in the bunker in the basement of the Capitol."
Meadows has been equally coy, telling reporters: “I think it would be inappropriate of me to comment on that. We have a good team of folks on Intel, I’m sure they will do a good job.”
"But everything has a season and so I look forward to providing a supporting role to my Republican colleagues as they move forward with the public testimony side of things. I can tell you having been in almost every single hour of the depositions, I’m more convinced than ever that my Republican colleagues will be able to see the truth in all of this and the lack of merit some of my Democratic colleagues have been making for many many weeks."
Here's a nice story from yesterday's elections.
Julie Briskman, the cyclist who went viral for flipping the bird at Trump's motorcade in 2017, a gesture that cost her her job, has won a seat on Virginia's state legislature.
She will be representing Loudon County, an area where she has liver her whole life and that just so happens to include the Trump National Golf Club Washington DC.
Vincent Wood has more.
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